As network-enabled devices and network technology have improved and been increasingly adopted around the world, more and more activities are being performed using local and remote devices in communication through wires or wirelessly. For example, e-commerce allows people to shop from virtually anywhere using a smartphone and a wireless network, such as a cellular network that covers a large geographic area. Increasingly, more and more media, including audio and video, is distributed to consumers over the Internet by service providers operating around the globe.
Those service providers are interested in attracting new customers, who are often required to create a customer account or a user account with any particular service the customers would like to use. Requiring users to create an account may permit a service provider to better provide a benefit to each particular user. For example, an audio streaming service may require users to establish user accounts. The audio streaming service may then collect information associated with that user account, such as preference information that allows the audio streaming service to recommend or provide content that the user is more likely to enjoy than randomly selected content or purely thematic content. In this way, the audio streaming service may provide a benefit to a user that the user may appreciate more than an alternative. For example, the audio streaming service may provide music that the user enjoys more than music played by local radio stations. By providing the improved service, the audio streaming service may be able to charge the user a usage or subscription fee. The user account may also include payment information, such as identifiers and access codes associated with one or more payment sources that permit the service provider to transact with the user on a subscription basis.
Many people may attempt fraud in connection with user accounts associated with such services. A conventional approach to preventing fraud has been to require verifiable information from the potential user at the time of sign up or account creation. For example, a service may require an email address in order to create a new account. The service may send a link or other information to the email address in order to verify that the actor seeking to create a new account has access to that email address. By requiring information from the user at the time of account creation, services may be able to prevent some amount of fraud. However, conventional approaches to fraud associated with user accounts have not been entirely satisfactory.
These drawings will be better understood by those of ordinary skill in the art by reference to the following detailed description.